Digital Innovation Process and Multi-actor Behavior:Research Framework and Prospects
With a surge of digital innovation practices,digital innovation has become a hot topic among scholars.Com-pared to traditional innovation,digital innovation has unique attributes such as unpredictability and iterability,which can help enterprises meet dynamic market demands.However,enterprises undertaking digital innovation need to interact with other actors to acquire resources for innovate outcomes,and these activities often exceed the boundaries and capabilities of the enterprises themselves.At the same time,digital technology enables multiple actors to achieve innovation through more efficient cross-space,cross-industry,and cross-boundary collaborative interactions.Therefore,it is necessary to interpret the digital innovation process from a multi-actor perspective to reveal its essence.Furthermore,under the connection of digital technology,multiple actors form dynamic and organic links based on consensus,utilizing complementary resources for collaborative innovation to achieve value co-creation,which has led to the emergence of digital innovation ecosystems.Com-pared with multiple actors in non-ecological contexts,those within the digital innovation ecosystem always follow the con-cept of coopetitive symbiosis,with more complex interdependencies among them.The behaviors of multiple actors will affect the co-evolution of the ecosystem and individual enterprises,where digital innovation activities are completed through continuous interaction with other actors within the ecosystem based on a shared vision.Therefore,it is necessary to organize and compare the digital innovation process between non-ecological and ecological contexts to further improve relevant re-search.Based on this,research on digital innovation written in English was extracted from 57 selected journals,including UTD24,FT50,SBE,Technovation,R&D Management,JPIM,RS,APJM.After dividing the stages of the digital innovation process,the behaviors of multiple actors at different stages in both non-ecological and ecological contexts are reviewed,as well as the outcomes of these behaviors.Furthermore,by summarizing the influencing factors of technology,organization,and environment,and analyzing the integrated effects of these factors in both contexts,the roots of the differences in be-haviors and outcomes of multiple actors in digital innovation under the two contexts were clarified.The research finds that there are differences in the behaviors and outcomes of digital innovation of enterprises between non-ecological and ecologi-cal contexts,with the latter having distinctive features,namely:(1)a shared vision among multiple actors;(2)connectivity among multiple actors;(3)resource sharing among multiple actors;(4)joint governance by multiple actors;(5)innovation outcomes as a result of interactions among multiple actors.This stems from the complex effects of multiple influencing fac-tors in ecological contexts such as"open organizational boundaries","ecological environment and rules",and"digital tech-nology providing potential for multiple actors to jointly complete innovative tasks".Finally,future research directions are proposed from four perspectives:social cognition,process,ecology,and the Chinese context.The social cognition perspective provides a starting point for revealing the micro-mechanisms of the digital innovation process;the process per-spective helps to understand and grasp the dynamic evolution mechanism of digital innovation process involving multiple ac-tors;the ecological perspective guides future research to analyze the formation and development patterns of digital innova-tion ecosystems with systemic thinking;exploring the issue of digital innovation from the perspective of the Chinese context helps to construct an indigenous theory of digital innovation and guide digital innovation practices in China.
digital innovation processdigital technologymulti-actor behaviorecological contextcomparative inno-vation behavior
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